Four hundred vicars of that tendency left, their clerical pockets stuffed with compensation, a decade ago after the CofE first decided that women could be ordained, and about a tenth of them came back. Now the remainder face the leap without the aid of a financial parachute, probably without their churches, possibly without the majority of their congregations. Their bluff has been called. It is put-up-or-shut-up time: do they really want to go?

They have increasingly claimed victim status while snidely demeaning the ordained women who now make up a quarter of the church's clergy. Women bishops are not the sort of thing that can be decided by vote of synod, they declare (unless they win the vote, that is), and their house journal – the magazine of the pressure group Forward in Faith – reeks of condescension and misogyny. And the CofE has gone out of its way to conciliate them.

Those who do leave may well find a church much less willing to accommodate their foibles than they imagine. The Vatican doesn't do democracy and it does not like dissent, or autonomy for that matter – at least, not the sort they are used to in Anglican politics. If they shout too loudly for their rights, or protest too patronisingly of their orthodoxy, they will not be welcome – Cardinal Hume famously told a previous high-profile convert to pipe down because he'd never understand Catholicism.

The welcome from the pews might not be too warm either, for these Johnny-come-lately apostates: many cradle Catholics can recall much-loved parish priests cast into outer darkness when they decided they wished to get married and found themselves forced out of the priesthood; and many earlier converts remember only too well how hard and what a lengthy process it was to convert. They didn't just waltz in.

The pope's move shows just what a farce the stately dance of decades-long discussions about church reunification has been. The Anglicans have always been supplicants, largely rebuffed by a Catholic hierarchy; and Benedict's decision not to bother consulting the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, about his announcement, besides being deeply contemptuous of a fellow church leader, shows precisely how he regards those not of the true faith. After all, Anglicans are, in the Vatican's words, "dubiously baptised laymen". Poor Rowan Williams must feel like the seven-stone weakling who has had sand kicked in his face.

Benedict is a formidably bright, deeply shy theologian who has spent decades shut up in the Vatican enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy, a subject on which he did not need to consult widely. It is not as if he does not have a track record of upsetting others: he's done it to the Jews and the Muslims – why not the Anglicans? They're much less bother.

This move is probably aimed mainly at the disaffected Episcopalians of the US, deeply conservative, extremely high church, and ambitious to distance themselves from a liberal hierarchy that allows the election of gay bishops – these are men who lead dioceses, not the dessicated, arsenic and old lace vicars of the CofE, many of whom – whisper it – seem to be themselves gay, though of course celibate. In America, the dissident dioceses hope to take their property with them; here there are just scattered parishes.

Where does this leave the Church of England, apart from the humiliation? Free, perhaps, finally to agree to the appointment of women bishops, a move logically predicated by the original decision to ordain women 17 years ago.

Not all opponents will leave: conservative evangelicals, who believe women have no place in "headship" of any organisation, from the family to the church, are hardly likely to desert an institution they see as a convenient boat to fish from, even if it is sinking. Some express a desire to complete the Reformation begun 500 years ago. They want to make it a less broad church, and certainly a less generous one. Perhaps those derided women clergy – bright, committed, tolerant and conscientious – really are the last, best, hope for the Church of England.